Media streaming services enhance the ease and convenience with which end users consume streaming content, such as VOD, OTT television, and placeshifted content. Media streaming services are, however, often limited by resource constraints affecting network reliability and bandwidth availability. When network bandwidth becomes undesirably constrained during a streaming video session, latencies may occur resulting in prolonged buffering and other delays in the presentation of streaming video content. Network latencies can also result in sluggish response times in implementing user-issued commands during a streaming video session, such as user channel change requests received when streaming OTT television content. Adaptive streaming techniques have been developed to enhance streaming media performance despite such variances in network bandwidth.
As conventionally implemented, adaptive streaming techniques minimize streaming bitrate through controlled degradations to the image resolution, the video frame rate, or both the image resolution and frame rate of streaming video content. In certain instances, multiple sets of packetized streaming files or “streamlets” may be proactively encoded at varying image qualities and/or frame rates to generate a high bandwidth stream, a low bandwidth stream, and any number of intermediate bandwidth streams. The consumer electronic device utilized to receive the streaming video content (herein, a “client media receiver”) can then select and reselect, as desired, the stream bandwidth best suited for current playback conditions. In other instances, adaptive streaming techniques may be implemented by actively adjusting encoding parameters in response to a monitored parameter affecting network bandwidth. For example, in this latter case, a streaming media server may vary its encoding parameters during a given streaming video session to encode streaming video at lower image resolutions and/or at decreased video frame rates as network bandwidth becomes increasingly constrained.